The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’: It Was Twenty Years Ago Today…
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ wasn’t the Beatles’ best album. It wasn’t even the best album of 1967 – the year of astonishing debuts by Jimi Hendrix and the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones’ Between the Buttons. As concept albums go, Sgt. Pepper seems thin compared with The Who Sell Out and altogether dubious when set next to Absolutely Free or We’re Only in It for the Money, the two Mothers of Invention LPs released in 1967. And as a piece of psychedelia, put up against Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the Beatles’ eighth album is pure tea and biscuits.
Nevertheless, twenty years later Sgt. Pepper still encapsulates its age – the good, the bad and the dopey – more evocatively than any other cultural dingus of the period. Flip it on the box (or the CD player now), and phantom pot smoke fills the air, lava lamps gurgle and burp in forgotten back rooms of the brain, and the synapses sizzle with imprinted memories of hallucinogenic ingestion. It may be dated, this soundtrack of the Summer of Love – surely more dated than any other Beatles album. But its very quaintness is a poignant reminder of the vanished pop values it embodies – values of love, community and musical progressivism – and the once young and adventurous pop audience that rushed to embrace them.
By 1967 the Beatles were perfectly positioned to make a Major Statement. In the four years since their arrival on the scene, they had evolved into the world’s most charismatically creative pop group. Even their earliest singles had introduced new chords and song structures into rock, and they were so prolific – and so endlessly inventive – that by 1965 the album had become their key artifact. Help! – released in August 1965 – was still essentially a collection of very good songs, but Rubber Soul, which appeared at the end of the year, offered a new refinement, a mood of reflective maturity that seemed to link many of its tracks. It also signaled a new sophistication in the studio, and by the time of the Beatles’ next LP, that sophistication had become incorporated into the fabric of their brilliance.
With its backward guitar tracks and tape-loop extravaganzas, Revolver, released in the summer of 1966, was a more adventurous pop record than anyone had previously attempted. It also confirmed the Beatles as recording-studio auteurs: they were unable (or unwilling) to perform any of the Revolver songs on their subsequent American tour, and when that tour ended, they decided never to play concerts again.
With the distraction of live performance eliminated from their lives, the Beatles were now free to really stretch out in the studio, to go in whatever creative directions their talents took them. Who knew, as 1966 wound toward a close, what wonders they might bring back?
The Sgt. Pepper sessions began on Friday, November 28th, 1966, when the Beatles assembled at the EMI recording complex at number 3, Abbey Road, in the London borough of St. John’s Wood, with their producer, George Martin, and their new engineer, Geoff Emerick. Martin had produced the Beatles from the beginning and by now had some claim, if anyone did, to being “the fifth Beatle.” Emerick, although only nineteen, had been on staff at EMI since 1962, the year the Beatles had been signed to the company’s Parlophone label. He had worked as Martin’s “tape op” (or second engineer) and had even engineered one previous Beatles song, “Tomorrow Never Knows” – the prophetically psychedelic final track on Revolver. Now – with Martin’s regular engineer, Norman Smith, departed to produce Pink Floyd – Emerick had been recruited to fill the engineering gap.
In the few weeks that remained before Christmas, the Beatles and their team recorded three new songs: “When I’m Sixty-four,” “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.” The first of these was a characteristic piece of McCartneyesque music-hall pop, tarted up with a reed section comprising two clarinets and a bass clarinet. The latter two numbers, however, were something new. Both were inspired by childhood reminiscences of Liverpool, but each reflected the distinct personality of its composer. McCartney’s “Penny Lane,” which recalled the suburban street life around a Liverpool traffic intersection, was jaunty and affectionate, instantly appealing. “Strawberry Fields,” written by Lennon and alluding to a castlelike orphanage called Strawberry Field, was drearnier, trippier (it marked the Beatles’ first use of a Mellotron) and rather more remote in commercial appeal than “Penny Lane.” But both songs revealed wondrous new depths in the Beatles’ music.
“I was so knocked out with both ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Penny Lane,'” Martin says now, “that I knew the Beatles were on a new wave. They’d shed a lot of the simplicity of even Revolver, which had been a bit more complicated than Rubber Soul. Now they were on a new plane.”
For Geoff Emerick, the two tracks “seemed to be one vast, giant step toward something that was better than we’d ever heard … into a new generation and a new time.”